NYU Tandon Professor Becomes First Woman Chair of the ACM’s Special Interest Group on Management of Data

NEW YORK, NY –  Juliana Freire, a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering and at the NYU Center for Data Science (CDS), has been elected as chair of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Management of Data (SIGMOD).

She is the first woman to be elected as chair of SIGMOD in its 42-year history.

Professor Juliana Freire

Freire, who is also executive director of CDS’s Moore-Sloan Data Science Environment and past director of graduate studies at CDS, has done seminal work on data reproducibility in scholarship for validation and review purposes. Freire and her team recently launched ReproZip: The Reproducibility Packer, a vital tool that simplifies the process of creating reproducible experiments.

She has also played a major role in building data science tools for projects with a social justice slant, such as the Memex Suite from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which streamlines the discovery of information on the Web. For example, Memex tools have been successfully used to uncover crimes taking place on both the surface and dark web.

“The technology developed by the database community has made the big data revolution possible,” said Freire, “but when new major big data or data science developments are publicized, the data management component is minimized or omitted. I will work towards increasing the visibility of database research as a vital and ongoing component of data-intensive science and computing.”

Established in 1975, ACM SIGMOD is focused on database management systems and technology. Its members include both academics and industrial researchers, and the group has been a pioneer in establishing reproducibility evaluations for its publications.

Freire added that she would work to increase researchers’ adoption of transparency and reproducibility best-practices for database scholarship. She brings many years of experience to the position through her seminal work.

About the New York University Tandon School of Engineering
The NYU Tandon School of Engineering dates to 1854, the founding date for both the New York University School of Civil Engineering and Architecture and the Brooklyn Collegiate and Polytechnic Institute (widely known as Brooklyn Poly). A January 2014 merger created a comprehensive school of education and research in engineering and applied sciences, rooted in a tradition of invention and entrepreneurship and dedicated to furthering technology in service to society. In addition to its main location in Brooklyn, NYU Tandon collaborates with other schools within NYU, the country’s largest private research university, and is closely connected to engineering programs at NYU Abu Dhabi and NYU Shanghai. It operates Future Labs focused on start-up businesses in downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn and an award-winning online graduate program. For more information, visit engineering.nyu.edu.

About NYU’s Center for Data Science
The Center for Data Science (CDS) is the focal point for NYU’s university-wide initiative in data science and statistics. Established in 2013 by Yann LeCun (who is now the director of artificial intelligence research at Facebook), CDS is a leading data science training and research facility that collaborates with other schools within NYU, and offers both an MS in Data Science and Ph.D. in Data Science. More information can be found at cds.nyu.edu and @NYUDataScience.